


if i never come back

by EtherealPrince



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Dream Sequences, Gen, Heart Attacks, M/M, i hope this makes somebody feel something, meetcute but really sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26453131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EtherealPrince/pseuds/EtherealPrince
Summary: Erik Lehnsherr, a German businessman living in New York, has a flight to catch.Based on the song Let It Happen by Tame Impala and its accompanying music video. Will make more sense if you've watched it.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	if i never come back

JFK Airport is always crowded, always noisy, always smells like cigarettes and the strange stink of leather that follows everyone with expensive suitcases. The line of taxis out front inches by, minute by minute, and people spill out of them like ants into an anthill.

Before his cab’s wheels even fully stop moving Erik is out like a shot and through the sliding doors. The people he pushes past are of no interest to him, (an unfortunate few he actually elbows) he just wants to get through security before the line is too long. 

He checks his watch. 1:10. His flight leaves in 20 minutes.

Erik taps his foot impatiently and curses under his breath. It wasn’t that he had overslept, because he never does, it was because his car was in the shop and Pietro was fully against his father setting foot in his shitty old BMW. They argued until Erik got fed up and said he’d take a taxi, _fine,_ but that Pietro was only getting away with this because he was in a hurry. And then he looked at his phone to see what time it was, and his heart dropped into his stomach, and now here he was.

Erik urges the security line to go impossibly faster than it already was, practically shoves his belongings and single suitcase through the x-ray, and sweats through the metal detector. He doesn’t stop sweating when he shoves his shoes back on and yanks his suitcase up an escalator to the terminal.

Gate 62 was far down the hall, and it was 1:20. Ten minutes to go. Erik is still sweating.

His suitcase bumps against his legs as he tries to lug it along, slowing him down, and people look at him strangely as he stumbles past them as if in a daze. And he was in a daze, he had tunnel vision on the tiny 62 sign in the distance and his legs didn’t seem to be working right. Every breath Erik takes in through his open mouth makes his chest ache, and his tie seemed too tight around his neck. He reaches up to loosen it with one finger, haphazardly, but it didn’t improve his ability to breathe. No, he felt like something very heavy was sitting on his chest, constricting his lungs.

His doctor had advised against putting himself in stressful situations and taking precautions to make sure he didn’t make himself anxious. Erik’s biology had always been strangely resistant to his heart medication.

He stumbles over to the side and drops his suitcase, and it tilts forward silently on to the floor as he braces a hand on a row of airport seats in an attempt to keep himself standing. His hand finds his way to his chest as he keels forward and falls onto his back on the floor, gasping like a fish out of water for air he couldn’t seem to draw into his lungs. His chest hurt something terrible and it wouldn’t lessen up.

Erik’s vision blurs as his eyes roll up to the ceiling.

\---

Suddenly, he’s in a plane.

Erik blinks once, twice, and looks around. He’s in his window seat, there’s a man sitting next to him in the isle seat, asleep, but no one in the center. Erik looks out the window--light, fluffy clouds float beneath the airplane. He’s not sweating anymore, nor does his chest hurt, which puzzles him. Did he pass out? Was he hallucinating? Did he take the wrong medication before he left that morning?

Nobody gives him an answer.

“Sir?”

Erik startles in his seat, one of his hands twitching toward his chest, and turns to look at whomever had spoken to him. A pretty young man in a steward’s uniform smiles at him from the isle, one hand on the beverage cart. His eyes are startlingly blue.

“Do you want anything to drink? You look a mite sick.” The steward says to him, smiling his pretty smile. Erik still has no idea how he came to be on this plane.

He shakes his head, mouth hanging slightly open like an embarrassing codfish. He feels like he should still be sweating, he feels warm. “No, no thank you.” Erik murmurs, barely aware of his words.

The steward nods good-naturedly, and Erik manages to focus on him long enough to notice that his name tag says the name _Charles_ on it. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask, Erik.” He says. Erik is thoroughly unnerved by hearing his own name fall from a stranger’s lips.

And then Charles moves on, down the isle. Erik settles back in his seat and tries to comprehend the nature of his existence. He looks out the window again but this time all he sees is white.

\---

Then he wakes up again.

This time he is in a hotel room.

Erik recognizes from the view that this is a room he has stayed in before, in a hotel he has stayed in before, that is meant to be used by people catching flights at JFK in the early morning or late at night. He’s laying on a bed, still in his work clothes he had left home in.

His head lolls to the side to look at the clock. 7:42. Am. It is early.

Erik groans as he sits up, and once he is upright his chest starts to hurt again. The pain this time is like a straight punch to his sternum, and he clutches his heart through his dress shirt as he bows forward to weather through the squeezing of his lungs.

He gasps, and pushes himself off the bed and forward to grasp for the glass of water and bottle of medicine he sees sitting on the desk across from him. Without having to look at the label on the bottle he knows it’s the medication he takes for his anxiety, and for some reason he thinks that if he gets the small white pill down his throat this very instant he won’t die.

He never gets to the bottle. He never even gets to the desk before he falls.

Erik collapses on the floor of the hotel room, inches away from his salvation, and his vision goes blurry again.

This time it goes clear again, after a minute, and Erik blinks grey spots out of his vision to see Charles crouching over him, dressed in a smart vest and tie with that same name tag pinned to his lapel. A man has collapsed in his room, he’s saying to someone outside of Erik’s eyesight, call an ambulance. Sir? Sir, are you alright? Can you speak?

Instead of looking kind and calm, Charles looks scared and worried, and Erik hates seeing his face twist up in fear. His eyes are still so very blue. So blue that he feels like he has definitely seen them somewhere before.

\---

Back when it was 1:10 and Erik Lehnsherr was not dying on the floor of an airport, Charles Xavier was not so gently nudged by him while he was hurrying to his gate. He turned around to look at Erik, and watched his back as he hurried off.

\---

Erik wakes up again and he’s back on the plane. Now he knows something is not right.

Everyone is gone.

The plane is entirely empty, no sleeping man or kind steward in sight. Somehow Erik knows that no one is flying the plane, yet when he looks out the window again it is still quietly drifting over an ocean of cloud. Wanda used to say the clouds at sunset looked like cotton candy, when she was small, and Erik feels a deep, pulsing ache in his chest for his little girl.

Somehow he knew that he would never see her or her brother again.

Erik exhales a shaking breath into the quiet of the plane. The loneliness is almost palpable in the cabin.

Suddenly, there is no loneliness or silence or nice clouds or thoughts of his daughter anymore, as the plane is shaking violently. Chairs rattle and bounce and oxygen masks drop down from the ceiling, just like all the infographics always said they would in case of an emergency.

_Finally someone has realized there is no pilot,_ Erik has just enough time to think wryly, before he comes to his senses and starts writhing like a captured animal in his seat. His seatbelt around his waist is cutting into his torso and he needs to get it off. His fingers fumble with the simple buckle and every time he thinks he’s undone the latch correctly it still sits there, tight across his body. The plane’s engine roars in his ears and rattles him down to his very core. Everyone always tells you to keep your seatbelt on during turbulence but Erik has an innate, primal desire to get it off get it off get it OFF.

\---

In the airport, Charles had turned back.

He had gone to war with himself briefly over the idea, but after catching a glimpse of the unknown man he had come into contact with he had an urge to... know him. Just to know him. There was something about his eyes.

It was hard to keep track of Erik (Though Charles didn’t know that was his name) in his dark suit against the many other people wearing grey and black in the airport, but he was tall enough that Charles could follow his head of auburn hair through the long hallway and to the side. He was practicing what he was going to say in his head, Hello I’m Charles Xavier I couldn’t help but noticing, or Excuse me I’m sorry to bother you but I’m Charles Xavier, but he forgot all words when he came upon the space where he expected for Erik to be standing but instead found him gasping on the floor.

Oh god.

He calls for the nearest airport staff in a strangled gasp, and in turn she takes her radio and unsteadily pleads for medical attention in Terminal B, gate 55. A man has collapsed beside his luggage and is struggling to breathe, is unresponsive to vocal prompts and pupils are unnaturally restricted. Hearing the words ‘struggling to breathe’ make something in Charles’ chest tighten.

Erik’s chest stutters and jerks where he lays, and Charles, the poor bystander, wraps his hand over the clammy one Erik’s got over his heart and squeezes.

Charles leans over to look at Erik’s face, rapidly growing more and more lax as the seconds tick by and he loses the energy to keep living. Erik’s eyes are a wonderful cool green that stand out next to his ruddy red hair, and Charles would be more drawn into them if they weren’t so fixed and still. Erik’s heart still beat, but for how long?

The staff member assures him (Erik) that medical will be here soon. Charles would hate to tell her that he doesn’t know how much they’d be able to do. Erik doesn’t respond.

\---

After an eternity Erik finally rips the seatbelt off of his waist, and a great rushing wind deafens him as he leaps out of his seat. He blinks, and he’s back sitting in it again.

This time, he and his seat are free falling through the clouds.

He doesn’t even have the mind to scream as he claws at his seatbelt again, watching in mute horror as he sees there are now three, four, five straps of polyester webbing that are keeping him tethered to this plummeting hunk of plastic and metal.

Still, he goes at them.

After five the seat belts stop adding on, and as wind rushes around him and he flips, somersaults, and tumbles through the open air without ever reaching the clouds somehow, Erik slowly rips each of them off and lets them dangle in the wind. It wasn’t like he’d be safer once he got them off, but he _had_ to. He knew he had to.

Once he’s able to push his seat away and free fall all on his own, Erik finds he isn’t as scared as he probably should be.

Whether he was in the airport, in the hotel, or on his plane, he would have been seeing these clouds anyway. No matter if he fell asleep on the plane, or had his medication in his hotel room. He’d end up here, no matter what had happened.

Erik realizes this and it brings him a surprising amount of peace.

The clouds are lovely, light and soft. The sun shines somewhere in the east. The sky is blue, like Charles’ eyes. Erik falls.

\---

A paramedic sits next to Erik’s body and rips open his shirt, attaching electrodes to his chest that are connected to a defibrillator. Charles sits in horrified silence as he watches this man he has never met get shocked momentarily back to life, and then fall back into darkness. He’s still holding Erik’s hand.

\---

Erik is jerked around in the clouds.

Every so often, while he’s falling, something will _\--pull--_ and he’ll hang suspended in midair for a second. Every time, it’s like a string wrapped around his heart was yanked upward and he loses his breath. It hurts. Erik wishes the string would just untie.

He goes like this for a few minutes. Stop, fall, stop, fall. Every time, it hurts. The clouds are so soft.

It stops after a while.

\---

Erik’s eyes unnervingly stay open as the paramedic tries to shock his heart into beating on its own again, and as they give up and try to take readings of his pulse, his brain activity, his breathing. All come back nonexistent. 

Charles sits next to him and keeps holding his hand. There is something tickling his cheek but he doesn’t know what it is.

Erik’s face seems to be made for agony. He hates it, but Charles thinks that his wet eyes and downward slope of his eyebrows, his slightly parted lips and the hollowness of his cheeks, his appearance was made to be beautiful in suffering. 

He doesn’t even _know_ this man. Charles does not know what his name is.

That doesn’t make watching him die hurt any less.

\---

Erik floats.

He’s not falling anymore. He’s flying.

He can feel the last remnants of his fear and pain fade. Nothing feels like anything anymore, and it’s relieving.

The clouds are so beautiful, and they part for him as he heads to meet them. Light shines through them and hits him in the face but he is not blinded.

Erik stopped fighting a while ago, and lets himself be carried off into the light.

He wants to apologize to his son, to kiss his daughter, to have told Charles that he thinks he’s beautiful, but he can’t. That’s okay.

His mother’s laughter echoes in his brain. Where have you been, schӓtzchen?

It’s with her love that Erik finds the strength to let go.

\---

Charles finally realizes he’s crying when authorities show up and are on phone calls with nearby mortuaries, when they’re looking through Erik’s clothes and to find his phone and wallet for identification. That’s when Charles finally hears someone say the dead man’s name, and that’s what makes him crumple over the body.

Erik Lehnsherr had two children.

Charles had never met him before in his life, but this was the most horrible thing he had ever witnessed and likely would ever witness. The staff member from before has a hand on his back and is telling him that there was nothing he could do, honey. Did he know him?

“No,” Charles chokes out. “I don’t know him at all.”

Earlier, when Charles just let Erik pass him in the hall and took an agonizing one and a half minutes to make the decision to follow after him, he just wanted to know him. Now, Charles curses himself for not immediately grabbing Erik’s wrist and insisting that he buy him a bottle of water, or buy him lunch, or _anything_ that would have kept him from going to gate 55 and having a heart attack.

He should have stopped Erik in his tracks and said hello. He should have let him sit and calm down, let his heart catch up with his body, before he went on about his business. Maybe Charles could have been the difference between one man’s life and death.

It’s selfish to think of, but Charles believed it, and he hated that he did. If he stopped him, then maybe everything would be okay. If only he could have done things differently, maybe it wouldn’t have turned out this way.

Charles sits next to a dead man in an airport in New York at 1:31 in the afternoon and brushes his hand over his cheek, his nose, his eyes. Erik’s eyes were so lovely.

Lovely like an ocean. Lovely like something Charles wanted to get to know.

Clouds drifted by outside.

**Author's Note:**

> please tell me what you think! this is my first cherik fic :]


End file.
